Power BI and OneNote

If you cope a lot with data, and don’t want to be limited to mere data crunching, but to draw out some useful insights instead, and share professional-looking reports, then Power BI is for you.

Although any Office 365 subscription allows for basic experiments in Power BI desktop (with reports stored locally, thus limited sharing options), you will need a professional (or academic) subscription to “Publish” your reports on the Power BI service (the web interface), for later visualization in OneNote.

First, in Power BI desktop, connect to your Professional account, and “Publish” your report.

A word of caution : you are potentially granting “access by anyone on the internet” with the “Publish to web” option. If your data are confidential, that may not be the right option.

If you have Power BI Pro, another option – “Embed in SharePoint Online” – will allow you to keep your report inside your organization, and manage it’s confidentiality. But you won’t be able to share it through OneNote this way, which was the purpose of this post…

ExceleratorBI : an excellent site with ressources for beginners, intermediate and advanced users.

I strongly recommend buying and reading Learn to Write DAX : if you get stuck with Power BI when trying to do slightly more complex things than drag & drop Pivot table or graph, this may be the right book to read for you : DAX is a journey, and you will be in good hands with Matt Allington !

The other option, “Embed in SharePoint Online” keeps the report inside your organization’ sharepoint, allowing you to manage it’s confidentiality. But you won’t be able to share your report through OneNote this way. You will however be entitled to show the report on a SharePoint Online page.